▲Mikheil Saakashvili in front of the Georgian Parliament in April 2013. Photo: Mariam Nikuradze/OC Media.
Former President Mikheil Saakashvili has been arrested in Georgia on the eve of crucial local elections.
During a press briefing on Friday evening, Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili announced that the authorities had arrested the third Georgian President and honorary chair of the opposition United National Movement party (UNM) and that he had been transported to prison.
Saakashvili has been convicted in absentia on several counts of abuse of power in Georgia, including ordering an attack on political opponent Valeri Gelashvili and illegally promising a pardon law enforcement officers implicated in a 2006 murder of Sandro Girgvliani.
After multiple broken promises to return since leaving the country in 2013, Saakashvili announced on 27 September that he would arrive in Georgia on the day of municipal elections, 2 October. While Georgian authorities vowed to detain him as soon as he set foot on Georgian soil, Saakashvili published an image of a ticket he had booked — set to land on Saturday evening — as proof of his impending arrival.
But the former Georgian President caught the country off guard earlier on Friday after publishing a video allegedly shot in the western city of Batumi and claiming to have already arrived in Georgia.
In a voice recording posted to Saakashvili’s Facebook page at 20:22, he is heard saying: ‘I may be about to be arrested now in Tbilisi, but know that we will fight until the end. We all gather tomorrow, many people will come out into the streets and we will win this election.’
It is unclear how Saakashvili crossed into Georgia from Ukraine, where he currently serves on the National Reform Council. Announcing his arrest, the government claimed that they had been tracking Saakashvili’s movement ‘starting from Ukraine’, contradicting the ruling party’s insistence earlier on Friday that he had not left Ukraine.
Irakli Gharibashvili (centre) delivering the news on 1 October, flanked by Interior Minister Vaghtang Gomelauri (left) and State Security Service head Grigol Liluashvili (right). Image via Imedi.
In his announcement on Friday, Gharibashvili congratulated Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of Georgian Dream, on the ninth anniversary of defeating Saakashvili and the UNM in the 2012 parliamentary elections that led to the country’s first election-based transfer of power.
The announcement comes 12 hours before polls open in Georgia for local elections, which are seen as a key test for the ruling party’s legitimacy.
The holding of free and fair elections is central to democracy, yet, if elections are not considered free and fair, then polarisation and questions about their legitimacy can divide society. Polling from CRRC Georgia suggests a deep partisan divide in Georgia when it comes to views on the quality of elections in the country.
Data CRRC Georgia collected before the 2021 municipal elections for ISFED and after the elections for NDI shows that supporters of the ruling party and opposition were and
Georgian Dream have won a byelection for the Batumi City Council. While the council is now formally hung, a ‘neutral’ candidate is suspected to be a ruling party ally.
Georgian Dream’s candidate Ramaz Jincharadze won a convincing victory in Saturday’s vote for a majoritarian council seat in Batumi, Georgia’s second-largest city and the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara.
The result will upset plans by opposition groups the United National Movement (UNM) and Lelo to deny the ruling
The opposition appears to have lost their majority on the Batumi City Council after the death of a councillor, allegedly following pressure from the government.
Nugzar Putkaradze died last Thursday in what his sister, who also sits on the city council, has said was a diabetic attack. The opposition United National Movement (UNM) have claimed that his blood sugar levels skyrocketed leading to his death after repeated attempts by people connected to the ruling party to make him defect.
Putkara
International and local election observers often note violations of the secrecy of the ballot in Georgia, and the 2021 local elections were no exception. According to a recent study, a plurality of people think such violations could take place in Georgia, and some have heard of such cases in the past year.
On the survey on election-related attitudes carried out by CRRC Georgia for ISFED, respondents were asked about a hypothetical country where a citizen’s vote was somehow revealed to a neig
